According to the report, six club executives met with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman this week to consider potential plans. They're taking ideas from those talks back to their teams, TSN reported.

Among the ideas:

• Reducing the current six divisions to four, with two in the Eastern Conference and two in the Western Conference. There would be one eight-team division and one seven-team division in each conference.

• The top two finishers in each division would be guaranteed the top four playoff seeds. The four other playoff qualifiers in each conference would be based on point totals.

• The Northeast Division -- which includes Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo and Boston -- would remain intact and add two other teams to form a seven-team division. Pittsburgh is one of those teams that would join the Northeast, sources told TSN.

• The current Atlantic Division (the three New York-area teams plus Philadelphia) would join the four teams from the current Southeast Division (all but one of Washington, Carolina, Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Florida).

• The eight-team division in the Western Conference would feature all teams in Pacific or Mountain time zones (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Colorado and Phoenix).

• The seven-team division in the Western Conference would feature teams that are in either the Central or Eastern time zones.

The NHL is considering the changes to help with travel and to keep televised games in the same time zones to maximize ratings.

The NHL has a problem. Notice the proposal to merge the 5 Northeast teams with 2 teams, but then also trying to keep the 3 NYC area teams and Philadelphia together with the southern teams. It makes no sense. Here' s your solution...swap a team from each conference:

If the Penguins move to Houston or Kansas City (or pretty much anywhere that keeps Central Time), I'd move Detroit to the Northeast. If they move to the West Coast, bump Colorado to the Central Division and Detroit to the Northeast Division.

The realignment above was pushed strongly by Minnesota and Dallas, who are sick of all the trips to the west coast.

The proposed realignment works well for the western conference. In the eastern conference, it is not clear how to split up the Atlantic Division. That is the source of most of the opposition.

The measure was voted on during the Spring meetings, and had the support of a majority, but not a sufficient majority to pass....
Look for it to come up again.

There is also a push to rework the schedule to have every team playing EVERYONE (spefically all teams from the other conference once Home and once Away each year.... right now it is twice home, twice away over a three-year perriod). The realignment could reduce the frequency of games against the other division within the same conference, freeing up games to be played against the other conference. This had not been thoroughly debated before it came up for a vote, but look for this to come up again. The idea seemed to have a lot of popular support.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the new Sprint Center in Kansas City is going to look like a vacuum without a major league sports team playing in it.

After a failed attempt to lure the Pengies into relocating, KC is identifying its next target. And it could be the Nashville Predators. Nashville is already in the division with St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, so no realignment would be necessary. Nashville's owner has the team up for sale, attendance is down, and Nashville was decimated by free agent defections this past off-season. The team may be in turmoil, and ripe for the picking....

With the economics of the NHL changing since the West coast and southern expansions, Canada would make the most sense for expansion of relocation. Cities that couldn't maintain teams due to salary restrictions, taxes, increase in the NHL exposure due to good TV contracts (new ones are average), now could survive. Quebec & Wininpeg could be options again for a struggling team.

With the economics of the NHL changing since the West coast and southern expansions, Canada would make the most sense for expansion of relocation. Cities that couldn't maintain teams due to salary restrictions, taxes, increase in the NHL exposure due to good TV contracts (new ones are average), now could survive. Quebec & Wininpeg could be options again for a struggling team.

Not Winnipeg. Small City, lukewarm fans, old arena, not much history outside of the Jets, the end result would be the same as what happened with the Jets. Quebec could handle a team, Hamilton, Ontario could as well, however, other than putting another team in Toronto or Montreal, you run out of places in Canada for teams.

Um, Nashville pulls a little "scare the city" chain and the city falls all over themselves trying to keep the Preds happy. Heck, the city SUBSIDIZES the team. Attendance aside, I don't think they're moving.

I've argued this elsewhere... there may accidentally have been a "southern expansion strategy," but since the NHL started all this with San Jose, only ONE of the new or relocated teams plays second fiddle in their arena... and that's being presumptuous of me to assume the Atlanta Thrashers play second fiddle to the Atlanta Hawks. This has been an ARENA GRAB. I believe the league probably sees more hard cash with this method than they did from ESPN... that could change, and I think we'll know the moment such a decision is made.

Winnipeg IS small, and the history may be fleeting, but NEW ARENA (not quite the capacity of the old barn, but very close). They're probably the size Calgary was when the Flames moved there from Atlanta... but Winnipeg needs to find oil to excite the league. I'd argue this IS a better relocation option for certain teams... just not the ones who would actually move. I believe it would take a minor catastrophe for a team that serves as the major tenant in their arena to leave, and the odds of that are rather overwhelming.

If the league stays healthy (revenues are steadily growing, as indicated by the annual increases in the salary cap), perhaps in a few years, they would entertain the thought of expanding to 32, and re-aligning into 4 8-team divisions.

That re-alignment might influence who would get the 2 new teams.

I think Pounder is correct, that most everyone currently has a fairly new arena (Pittsburgh was perhaps that last team to need to replace the 1960 vintage "Igloo"). However, league revenue is FAR from evenly distributed, as local TV revenue varies wildly from team to team (and the national TV contract (vs. and NBC), although equally distributed, doesn't compare to NFL, NBA, etc. )

So the Collective Bargaining Agreement has had 2 effects.
1) The salary cap, has limited the hoarding of talent, and you see teams like Pittsburgh having to shed talent to comply with the cap. This excess talent becomes available to other teams to promote some "parity".
2) The salary floor forces each team to buck up for some minimum payroll, and presumably acquire some amount of talent, which prevents an owner from trying to go "too cheap", and operate an inherently non-competitive team. However this floor can present problems for well-intentioned small market teams that lack a big gate / big local TV contract. Such a lack of revenue could compel a team to consider moving to somewhere that offers financial inducements.

KC has built a new arena (the Sprint Center) on speculation, and Houston is the largest population center in the USA without an NHL franchise. Las Vegas has expressed interest, but there are the gambling issues to consider.... Salt Lake City might be attractive.
Hamilton and Quebec would appear to be capable of filling an arena on any given night.
In fact, the founder of "blackberry" in Hamilton, had finalized a deal to purchase the Penguins, and his intent was to move them to Hamilton, but Lemieux and the league weren't crazy about that.

IF an expansion to 32 would occur, I agree with pf9 above that Columbus should move to the East (they are not far from Buffalo and Pittsburgh), and add two teams in the Central / Mountain time zone (Houston and KC ?), both of whom would play in the West.

Houston is a risky venture... a market so southern that it has a large Hispanic base that may not take to the sport, and they're likely going to play second fiddle to the Rockets in Toyota Center. Question: is the market big enough that sharing is more lucrative, much like the big 3 and Philadelphia? My guess- if it were, there would already be a team there. Could a new arena be built? That's the question.

Las Vegas' main issue isn't the gambling. It's the casinos. Go figure. They put up a private venture to head off the publically funded attempt mayor Oscar Goodman and company put out. Now that the Goodman venture is dead, naturally, the private venture isn't getting off the ground. It's called vaporware, because the casinos hate subsidized competition. None of the big 4 will happen in Vegas.

The NHL will expand if they decide revenues have fallen sufficiently to warrant a bailout. They might try to beat the NBA to Sprint Center, for that matter. Past that, they can try to compete Canadian city versus Canadian city for the other slot. I don't think they're worried so much about East/West issues, whether that's smart in the oil decline years or not. They might actually bend all sorts of rules to help Vancouver with either Portland or Tacoma, unless Seattle actually manages to fund another renovation of the Seattle Centre/Key Arena site... but I suspect they'll take the two best arena opportunity markets.

Gotta figure that Kansas City still tops the list, with the Islanders the team likely to move (losing $20 million a year, franchise was already valued less in 2007, when economy was good, then when they were purchased during the dotcom days).

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